


Day

by LNJames



Series: Suddenly Everything Has Changed [8]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-26 19:32:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17147789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LNJames/pseuds/LNJames
Summary: We all churn inside.Season 3/4 re-imagined. Canonish, with liberties and justice for all.





	Day

_No other faith is light enough for this place_

A story has a beginning, middle, and end. Sounds simple. Start from the beginning, fill in the middle spaces in between, and close with a happily ever after. The only problem with this simple formula is that it presumes there is a clear beginning and a clear end. It doesn’t take into account a story that spins on repeat like a scratched record, bumping back to the same note just when it sounds like the song is moving on. History repeats and a different beginning starts. Kara wondered if there actually was an ending to the dance she and Lena had been doing all along. Dr. M would likely tell her that the story was hers to tell and she had a say over some of it, the parts that were hers. She also stopped going to see Dr. M now that she was better, now that the Worldkillers were gone and Argo City was found and Kara herself was in a much different place. How could she not be better?

But life was a funny story. It was full of tenuous, fragile, resilient narratives.There were rabbit holes and linear paths and stops and starts and predictable surprises and unknowable knowns. There were contradictions found in everything that connected the living as if there was an answer to the unknown. Kara Zor-El spent a very, very long time thinking about what it meant to be alive when time did not move, when the story stopped for so long she wondered if it was over and she just hadn’t realized it. Drifting in the Phantom Zone did more than stop time for Kara, it made her question everything about being alive. Her parents thought they were saving her and in the end, she had survived, but there was a cost that her lungs paid, there was a toll on her mind, her heart still owed itself..something. The backdrop of a girl falling from the stars to earth and becoming a superhero was a complicated relationship with life and the things that made her feel alive.

But in the middle of the story, tucked in moments little and large, were hints and clue to how it ended before it began again. Not to obfuscate, but Kara still felt like there were things about Lena Luthor that she may never understand. She had barely come to terms with what Lena had done and why and how Kara’s own fear stirred the mix into something volatile and explosive. What was Lena capable of doing in the name of salvation? Synthetic kryptonite, refractive scatter-fields, chemical dispersal mechanisms, transmatter portals, harun-el replication, alien detection devices, image inducers. The list was long and far from incomplete. Kara had fallen in love with a brilliant woman driven by the fear of loss and that was a dangerous thing.

***

The glass room was quiet for everyone else but Kara. She could hear it all. She could hear the way Alex shifted, her hand never far from a weapon even when it was not needed. She could hear Mon-El’s discomfort in the way his mouth kept shut, Imra’s quiet contemplation, and the internal calculations clicking inside Querl Dox’s head. She could hear J’onn’s mind probing through the wavelengths as if whatever truth he found would be different than what would be said. And finally, she could hear the way a heart beat steady and unafraid and determined and on guard. The way hands folded in front, one pressed against a shiny glass table and the other smoothing over an arm. Kara even heard the softest sound of Lena Luthor’s lips parting, ready to counter the punches that were about to be thrown her way.

“Please state your name.”

“Lena Kieran Luthor. Where should I begin?”

Kara crossed her arms and held herself tight, trying not to let the anger out in this setting. She already knew that Lena could see what the others likely felt, ripples of chaotic energy rolling off Kara’s body at the facts. And the facts were hard to hear, enough so that Kara slipped into a different role, a harder one reserved for the job of saving the world.

“How long has this been going on?”

“Three weeks.”

Lena dressed sharply in green and was matter of fact as she looked up and caught Kara’s eyes. It was hard to fathom and hard to reconcile not the truth stated but all the truth that hadn’t been shared. Lena never lied to her, her attention at CatCo was sufficient to keep things running, but her ‘work’ at L-Corp had taken over some nights, some mornings, some time that she and Kara had. It meant Lena’s plans were changed at the last minute, just like Kara’s plans changed suddenly with new threats. It meant less time together, except middle of the night visits or exhausted early morning weekend naps. Had she been too distracted to tell something was wrong? Had Mon-El’s return and Imra’s presence and the legion future that Querl Dox described taken more of her attention than she realized? What about everything else, Psi and Livewire and Colville and My’rnn and J’onn and Winn and James and Alex - all the things that happened to all the people she knew and the city she loved? How could she miss what was right in front of her face? Kara closed her eyes when she began to speak because it was too hard to look at Lena, her words coming out slowly and deliberately.

“And what exactly have you been doing with Sam for weeks?”

Lena watched her and took a deep breath before she stared off in front of her, remembering and recounting with less emotion than Kara herself felt. Lena could do that when Kara couldn’t, turn off feelings and tuck them away. It was unsettling to watch a scientist in action when Kara could feel herself hurting on the inside from a betrayal of sorts. She hadn’t expected Lena to keep things from her, had thought that they were in a place where that didn’t happen, that they were closer than that. She hadn’t been prepared for this story, the one that Lena wrote without her.

“When I first suspected that Sam was more than she knew, I took her to a secret lab in L-Corp where I conducted a series of tests.”

In Kara’s mind, she saw that lab and stood in the room that once held Sam, that held Reign and now it was a place of ruin. Glass broken and danger unleashed. It was hard not to look for blame, to try to understand the cause, to come to conclusions that involved Lena Luthor in ways Kara preferred not to consider.

“With her consent.”

At this, Lena looked at her again before Kara dropped her eyes to the table and penetrated the glass and the grain and the concrete and the granite until all she saw below her was a great unknown of boiling magma. Luckily, Alex took over.

“When I examined her, I found nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Then you weren’t looking for the right things.”

It wasn’t smug, it wasn’t self-righteous, it was just Lena and how she analyzed the world in a different way. Detached, clinical, objective. It drove her mad. Sam had not been feeling herself and had come to Alex, the smart sister of her friend, Kara Danvers. Of her. Sometimes it was hard to be three people at once. Alex kept them both moving along in this difficult situation. Scientist to scientist.

“So what did you find?”

Lena took a breath as she looked down, her face practiced in the ways of someone who was familiar with keeping a straight face in the midst of attention. Ever the CEO, ever the removed heart, Lena was everything Kara wasn’t right now and it made Kara clench her jaw and tighten her arms around herself.

“After sequencing her DNA and comparing Sam’s blackouts to Reign’s attacks…”

Here, Kara watched as Lena took another breath and presented her case to the board as if this were a group of investors or dispassioned board members who just wanted the bottom line and didn’t care about the personal. Lena looked around them resolutely before she delivered bad news.

“I came to the conclusion that Reign and Sam were one and the same. Sam is Reign.”

At this, Kara tilted her head down and absorbed all, the threat that Reign and the Worldkillers now presented, the damage done to Sam, someone she had come to know and like, and of course, the complicated feelings that came with the woman in green who now looked at her knowing the everything she felt was on display across her face and the atoms in disarray. J’onn took over.

“So, for three weeks, you’ve been harboring and abetting a mass murderer.”

Kara could feel the shift in Lena’s tone at that question and the backstory of just how many people Lena counted as such.

“I helped a friend.”

“And you didn’t think to bring this to our attention?”

Kara watched as Lena began to tighten, her face and brows responding in ways that she had seen when the world came for her because of her name and the assumptions that came with it. Kara took a breath at what came next.

“The attention of a clandestine organization that’s never formally acknowledged its existence to me? No. I am not your employee. I’ve not signed a contract nor sworn an oath.”

Here, Lena paused and looked at her as if she were like all of the others, like everyone else who did not trust the Luthors. Kara could see the cracks forming, the way things unraveled between them and there was little she could do because..because. Because there was something inside of her that was afraid of where this was going and what it meant for them both. Lena’s voice hardened and became stone.

“I conducted an L-Corp experiment, using L-Corp technology on L-Corp property.”

The tone was one thing, but the facts were another. Reign was loose and Kara was the superhero here and earth was in danger. There would be time for disappointment and feelings later so she channeled something made of steel inside her, marshaled the atoms to behave, and spoke as if this were a colleague on a quest and not her lover. She could stuff her own feelings away long enough to find something useful and not get stuck on repeat.

“What did you discover?”

It was enough to get Lena to relax and take a breath and open instead of close.

“I was hoping to isolate the spark that turned Sam into Reign, but I didn’t get a chance to finish.”

The reality was that Lena Luthor had enough time with someone who had tried to kill her, had nearly done the job in fact.

“Weeks with Reign…”

Kara took a moment as Lena was talking to remember the Fall. Everything was quiet, everything was dark. She had felt herself drop like a rag doll, arms outstretched and her cape unable to hold her up. The wind rushed through her ears until she heard nothing at all except the exhale of her own breath as everything went dark. It was like falling into the Phantom Zone where everything stood still and time ended. There was no sound when she landed, no feeling, no pain and it was nothing but darkness. Suspended again, timeless, trapped. Reign had done what few others had before, rendered Kara mortal and defeated. Those long moments trapped in her head and in her apartment and in another Phantom Zone, hours or days or weeks or months or lifetimes, it all did not matter because to Kara, it felt like forever. She swallowed it all down because now was not the time and how she felt about the woman she loved was not relevant to the time she and everyone she loved could lose. It shifted things inside her and reconfigured the story.

“Do have any way of tracking the Worldkillers?”

Lena looked at her and blinked, her voice quiet and sorry.

“No.”

It was the first sign that the other woman realized the line in the sand had been crossed and the line was a crinkle in her own brow she felt forming and the line was a slash across the palm of Kara’s hand dug into her own arm crossed against her chest and her heart and everything inside that threatened to spill out. It turned her cold and she felt it, business now intruding upon her personal life as she looked around the table. Her voice gave her away.

“Anyone else?”

“They’ve gone underground. They’re not coming up again until they have something big to do.”

Mon-El was no comfort and Imra’s next words were less so.

“The future’s fate is more precarious than ever.”

Fate and the future was something that made Kara pause, for many reasons, enough so that it swirled the thoughts in her head about how she could exist in it when everyone she loved was constantly threatened, when she could not predict how she could save this world and the one that came after it. There would be many threats ahead but the one facing her now was ancient and dark and Kryptonian, too close to who she was and where she came from to forget. Reign was different, she was powerful and made of dark magic, the kind that skirted the edges of Kara’s memories of myths and stories that never ended well. It scared her and right now she couldn’t afford to feel that.

“How did you keep her contained?”

Maybe it was the way Lena looked at her first before she turned away, the way she paused before she swallowed and then looked ahead in a room full of people interrogating her. Maybe it was how Lena held her arms close and kept everything inside that gave Kara pause. Or maybe it was the answer that came like a slice and a tear that unraveled the fabric that held them together.

“Lex kept a vault in the lab. When I took over L-Corp, I inherited all of its assets, for good or for ill..”

And then Kara watched as Lena’s eyes found her and she spoke a truth that cut deep and hard.

“I used Kryptonite.”

It was the first time that Kara truly considered what the name Luthor could mean for her and their future. Lena Kieran Luthor, her love and her ruin all the same.

***

_Did she wish she were different? Sometimes. Lots of times early on, less now. But there were still moments where Kara wondered if the fire between her ribs was star-born or caused by what was missing. So many years drifting in the Phantom Zone and feeling lifeless in so many ways, her cells fed off each other to stay alive. On earth, they looked for other sustenance and what caused her to burn now was complicated. It was alchemical magic mixed with oxygen and joy and purpose and longing. Timeless drifting torched itself into determination and desperation, red golden light seeped out of her like lifeblood and fueled her. It was the same mix that made her heroic. When reconstituted and lit by something more mercurial, this feeling came out of her in other way. The side effects of being Kara Zor-El and there were many. It made her fingers spark and her breath come heavy and her eyes warm a path to what she wanted when she allowed herself to want. It made her forget the time she spent suspended and forced her to live in the here and now. It was something that she was reluctant to say out loud because what words would there be to describe how she felt. Love and longing swirled inside Kara and it spilled out of her when Lena Luthor encouraged such things._

_Kara Zor-El was most fluent in one language even when she tried to speak others. She had Kryptonian words she could use and she did, more a quiet mantra than anything else because her alien words didn’t quite fit the rhythm of earth and the rhythm of Lena’s mouth. If you had asked Kara to talk about life and how it made her body hum, she would have found a way for her hands to speak for her. No one knew Kara’s hands like Lena did and that was part of the problem._

_“Lena..”_

_She could only pant out that name as she looked down and held the glass wall with one hand, the other curved around Lena’s jaw, two fingers sucked between ruby lips and green eyes holding her own. Her ruin came in the form of Lena Luthor, on her knees, in her office high above National City. What else could she say, really, when Lena sank down after a fight that left them both too tired to fight anymore. The confrontation at the DEO was just the tip of the iceberg and Kara hated that in the midst of everything, with Reign on the loose, she flew here, to Lena’s, because. Because. Because it was complicated. And because she was scared. And because. Anger was a fuel Kara burned when loss transformed into something else. Surrender was a drug Lena could not resist when Kara glowed red and gold. This was the push-pull of being who she was in the world._

_“How can you do this to me..”_

_Kara’s own whisper of ragged wonder was brought about by Lena’s hands on her thighs, gently pushing to make space for her mouth. The strongest will could be bent by one just as strong through softness and submission when such things were needed, when a superhero couldn't ask for that in words. In the back of her head, Kara heard her own voice desperate for the right answer. ‘Do you have any more Kryptonite?’ as if any answer would do. As if their time in the dark valley didn’t diminish her resolve enough, as if the fight with Worldkillers during an eclipse wasn’t enough. ‘I may have been overreacting’ was what she had said when inside she felt the sting still, a little betrayal not fully sprouted. She wanted to trust, she wanted a lot of things that she wasn’t sure she would get them. But right now, it was enough._

_*_

_Earlier, when she had landed on the balcony after seeing the glow from Lena’s after a very long day, Kara knew there were still things between she and Lena that needed to be resolved. She looked out over the city and tried to imagine it as a place where there wasn’t constant danger, where she wasn’t always needed, where a superhero couldn’t be brought to her own knees by a substance that had been kept in a vault by a madman who shared a name with the woman who now walked out to greet her on the balcony, black dress and hair down._

_“Surprised you’d want to see me.”_

_At Lena’s words, Kara turned around and crossed her arms, her cape catching the wind just a little, enough to rustle before it settled on her shoulders again. She took a breath and glanced at Lena, the woman who held her heart in a too precarious position. It was a threat of human proportions and Kara felt herself swallow. There had been anger, she had felt it churning inside and she had come here with a taste of it in her mouth. But when Kara saw the way Lena looked at her, unsure and afraid of what else would come between them, she sighed.  
_

_“You know, for quite some time, everyone’s been looking for any reason..any reason they could to distrust you. And it’s not your fault..it’s just..um, Lex baggage or whatever..”_

_Kara watched as Lena looked at her before her eyes turned outwards and her hands clasped the other, a nod her only acknowledgement. Kara stepped closer._

_“But for the last two years, you’ve done nothing but prove them wrong..”_

_Lena shook her head, a rueful smile on her lips as she spoke, resigned to her name._

_“Until now.”_

_Kara shook her head._

_“No. No. The way I see it, our friend came to you with something unbearable. And you tried your best to help her carry it. You did everything in your power to help her, regardless of what that might look like to other people. To me...when I found out.”_

_The thing about living was that it was full of twists and turns, surprising events, dangers imagined and unimaginable. Kara knew this, it wasn’t something that unsettled her. What she wasn’t sure of was what it meant for the both of them, their relationship and how they were with each other. Lena kept secrets, dark secrets, from her. Could she set those things aside knowing that the woman she loved was full of secrets hidden deep down? There were risks to such things, personal risks to her that could threaten a superhero who was needed now more than ever. And there were risks to her feelings when a thing like trust was so central. In her head, Kara got it, she understood why Lena did what she did. In her heart, the flutter of doubt was still there even as she stepped closer. If Lena hadn’t softened, if she wasn’t giving her the look of someone who did whatever it took to save Sam no matter the cost and expected that cost to come from her own skin, Kara might have let that doubt bloom larger. Sometimes people made harder choices than they let on and the toll such things took was hidden inside. Lena tried to save Sam and that was enough for Kara, the rest could be worked through with time. Instead of the interrogation of early, something softer came to her and she reached out and let her fingers run along Lena’s arm._

_“And that’s beautiful..that’s somebody I..want..”_

_Lena looked at her, wonder and doubt on her own face, after everything. Her word was quiet in the night air, National City twinkling all around them._

_“Really?”_

_“Yeah, really.”_

_Kara smiled because for a moment, the way Lena looked at her made her forget the day and everything that came with it.  She forgot she was angry because what was inside of her transformed when she was with Lena. The fight over Luthor Kryptonite, the underworld full of Reign and Pestilence and Purity, how the Legion was up against something dark and foreboding and Kara needed to trust everyone around her now more than ever. Lena Luthor took her hand and pulled her into the softly lit office of a company that manufactured so many things that were just this side of right or that side of wrong, depending upon perspective. It wasn’t as if Kara didn’t know who she had chosen or what Lena had done or could do. It was that sometimes Kara wanted to breathe in a different way. Kara felt the atoms on the surface of her skin rearrange into a new kind of potential and she shook her head as she spoke._

_“Can we just..”_

_Sometimes it was easier to forget and just be in the world that didn’t require worry or the weight. Kara might be a superhero, but she didn't want that now. She didn't want to save anyone or think about a time before fathoming when Krypton birthed and manifested ancient darkness. There was time for that ahead, because right now, Kara's body sparked at the way Lena looked at her, soft after all the hardness and fight that the day had brought. Kara couldn’t help how the space between her ribs glowed golden and expanded to inhale enough oxygen when Lena pressed in tight against her, hands splayed across a symbol on her chest and whispering out words Kara wanted to hear right now._

_“Yes..we can just..”_

_The drug of Lena Luthor slipped off ruby lips against her neck and Kara closed her eyes. Hands reached up and ran through her hair, encouraging a loosening. Fingers ran along her jawline and her shoulders and down her arms until Kara’s own hands found curves to press and pull until hips were right where she wanted them. When Kara came to Lena in a cape and still full of danger and damage and how a fight could settled inside of her and burn, there was only one way to make everything better. She wished she were different, maybe, but when Lena pressed a finger against her lips, she couldn’t help but open her eyes and see how a brilliant woman knew her better than she knew herself sometimes. Kara reached for the glass window behind Lena with one hand because her other went to a softer mouth, slipping fingers inside as if to touch magic. She wanted this because her body could not settle itself in a world with a yellow sun and Lena Luthor in it. Her mind only spoke in Kryptonian words as she watched Lena sink to her knees and look up at her like a dark secret. Would she be ruined or saved? Did it really matter? So much time lost in space and this was one way to make that time count for something, anything, that made her feel alive.  
_


End file.
